Happy Halloween. I’ve been reading The Witches by Stacy Schiff, an account of the Salem witch trials held in America in the 17th century. In this process 150 people were accused of witchcraft with 20 people (14 of whom were women) executed. While I read the book I was struck by the similarities between the witchcraft of puritan New England and the Borderline Personality disorder of today. I probably wouldn’t have made this link without listening to Lucy Johnson talking about the validity and reliability of the BPD diagnosis. While Lucy phrases it better, because BPD is so often diagnosed by gut feeling as opposed to structured assessment, the validity is very poor. Validity in this case means how ‘true’ criteria are for measuring a specific condition. The reliability is much better meaning that faced with the same presentation, a high number of people would agree “that is BPD”. As Lucy points out, in 17th century Salem, most people would be able to identify a witch. The reliability of the witch diagnosis was pretty good. Whether there were any witches present is another matter entirely.
As part of the preparation for writing this I did a bit of googling to see how much this idea had been thought about before. One writer suggested that Salem occurred because a number of girls at the time had BPD. I want to toss that theory out of the window right now, but let’s have a look at the book The Witches and see if there is any overlap between the occult of 4 centuries ago and the BPD of today. I’m convinced that in the past someone has already done this better.
In the 17th century it was certainly accepted that witchcraft was a thing. People would happily find a supernatural explanation for whatever phenomenon occurred in their lives and if things took a turn for the worse, a witch was often the answer. Between 1580 and 1680 the UK disposed of (and by that I mean murdered) around 4000 witches. Arguments at the time would go along the lines of “I cant explain what just happened, therefore it must be sorcery/witchcraft/the devil”. Absence of anything else was proof of something diabolical at work. One theologian claimed that witchcraft was so impossible and far fetched that it had to be true.
In New England, most witchcraft cases focused on women who were overly attentive or begging. They tended to be less popular people of the community. Most cases involved “a calcified knot of vexed small town relations”. Witchcraft was helpful in that it placed blame elsewhere and removed responsibility from individuals. Why has my business failed? Witches! And if witches were what you were looking for, they became easy to find. Being able to blame witches meant people could take “a holiday from reason”.
Women were easy targets for the label of witch. The witch finding manual describes all women as “"a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors!” so we can already see an imbalance in society, even before the witch label is applied.
Its worth looking at the background of the people who are being accused of witchcraft. Most girls would be sent out to other households to learn the craft of housewifery. “Servant girls fended off groping hands and unwanted embraces from lascivious swineherds, from men of the house, and from visitors to the house, often at appallingly early ages. Isolated, semi-orphaned, they seldom knew someone to whom they could appeal to wield pitchforks or pray at dawn on their behalf.” Physical beatings were the discipline method of choice. The traumatised women lived in a traumatised society. Their homes were on a frontier where raids, skirmishes, violence and abductions would have been known to most.
Amidst all that 17th century New England had to offer, a group of young women became afflicted with what was rapidly diagnosed as a diabolical assault. As they named people who were using their nefarious powers upon them, the accused were interviewed and tried for witchcraft. One woman had been accused before and was confrontational in her interview. It’s not clear whether she was confrontational because she had been previously accused or whether she had previously been accused because she was confrontational. Either way, as the young women collapsed when ‘witches’ looked upon them and pointed to ghosts in the courtroom, the court found the evidence it wanted to find. No one accused was cleared and denial of witchcraft was the most likely thing to get you executed.
Fast forward 400 years and things have changed a bit. There are more iphones and less puritanism but I wonder if some elements of the Salem era remain. In the mental health services there is a firm belief in the diagnosis of personality disorder and the magic powers that go along with it. Much like the villagers of New England, a team of people in authority tasked with addressing the causes of suffering will see a young woman who may not be demure and accepting of the expertise on offer and name her as having BPD. There will often be a difficulty within this relationship. These difficulties in interactions then become identified as being caused by her BPD and her powers grow. When the team that was already full of politics, rivalries, hierarchy and resentments begins to split apart, this split is attributed to the traumatised 18 year old who has been repeatedly let down by those who should help her. Like the witches of Salem, the maleficence isn’t located in one person but can affect others. Staff who are sympathetic are seen as under the spell of the labelled girl. They are being manipulated and suckered in. While taking a ‘holiday from reason’, staff can locate all problems in the patient while protecting their professional persona. She likes some members of staff more than others – because she has bpd. She hurts herself worse since we stopped her cutting – because she has bpd. She complains when we tell her her difficulties are all her own fault – because she has BPD. The BPD invalidates any legitimacy to what she is saying and so like the testimony of witches, it can be easily dismissed.
Much like the witches of yesteryear, those diagnosed with BPD today have a disproportionate experience of trauma compared to the rest of the population, with those experiencing a BPD label more likely to have lived through trauma than those with another mental health diagnosis.
Like the witchfinders, the staff in our mental health services have had similar training, both formal and informal, about how to identify people with disordered personalities and the special powers that they hold. This means that rather than seeing someone who has lived a life where those who should have helped have taught them that others can’t be trusted, the modern witchfinder nose sniffs out borderline personality disorder. Rather than seeing a desperate attempt to manage emotional pain in whatever way works best, staff see an arcane ritual designed to seek attention from staff. These modern day witches are associated with similar evil intentions to their latter day counterparts. They desire to manipulate, entrance, sow dissention and wreak havoc because they have BPD. The staff in our mental health services are educated, respected and seen to know better, but they reside in organisations that can mirror the lack of safety and consistency of the frontier. You might not get mauled by a bear, but people carry a great fear of being scapegoated, suspended and pressured to do more with less. These are not breeding grounds for reflective and rational thought.
It didn’t take very long for the people of Salem to become a tad embarrassed about how they’d let misogyny, prejudice and a blind adherence to dogma lead them to murder 20 people. In an age where many professional bodies and people with lived experience called for the label of personality disorder to be abandoned, the textbooks with personality disorder criteria are still being printed. People without better ways of understanding reactions to trauma are still labelling personalities as disordered. Fragile, frightened staff groups are still locating all of the teams problems in distressed individuals. We don’t execute people anymore, but we do either refuse to let them in to places that should help or refuse to let them out. If we see people as witches, it’s hard to treat them with kindness.
We need to stop training witchfinders. We can offer different narratives to our students and staff while acknowledging the canon of the textbooks. We can recognise that we will not get thoughtful reflective practitioners while services have to resort to fire fighting and choosing what fires to tend and what to let burn.
To conclude, “in the years since its laws has been codified, New England indicted witches over 100 witches, about a quarter of them men.” (Thats 3:1)
Today, BPD is diagnosed in the ratio 3:1 female:male
If you can bear to read a bit more I’d strongly urge you to apply the witch finding lens to the piece How Not to Get a Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder by Recovery in the Bin.
I very much enjoyed the book The Witches which you can get here. All the quotes in this article are taken from that book.
Apologies to all the worlds genuine witches and Wicca practitioners of the world if the tone of this article isn’t quite right.